ABSTRACT
History of mental illness is a major factor behind suicide risk and ideation. However research efforts toward characterizing and forecasting this risk is limited due to the paucity of information regarding suicide ideation, exacerbated by the stigma of mental illness. This paper fills gaps in the literature by developing a statistical methodology to infer which individuals could undergo transitions from mental health discourse to suicidal ideation. We utilize semi-anonymous support communities on Reddit as unobtrusive data sources to infer the likelihood of these shifts. We develop language and interactional measures for this purpose, as well as a propensity score matching based statistical approach. Our approach allows us to derive distinct markers of shifts to suicidal ideation. These markers can be modeled in a prediction framework to identify individuals likely to engage in suicidal ideation in the future. We discuss societal and ethical implications of this research.
- John Aldrich. 1995. Correlations genuine and spurious in Pearson and Yule. Statistical science (1995), 364--376.Google Scholar
- APA American Psychiatric Association, American Psychiatric Association, and others. 1980. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. (1980).Google Scholar
- Roy F Baumeister. 1990. Suicide as escape from self. Psychological review 97, 1 (1990), 90.Google Scholar
- Aaron T Beck. 1979. Cognitive therapy of depression. Guilford press.Google Scholar
- Aaron T Beck, Roy Beck, and Maria Kovacs. 1975. Classification of suicidal behaviors: I. Quantifying intent and medical lethality. The American journal of psychiatry (1975).Google Scholar
- Aaron T Beck, Maria Kovacs, and Arlene Weissman. 1979. Assessment of suicidal intention: the Scale for Suicide Ideation. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology 47, 2 (1979), 343.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Adriel Boals and Kitty Klein. 2005. Word use in emotional narratives about failed romantic relationships and subsequent mental health. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 24, 3 (2005), 252--268.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ronald L Bonner and Alexander Rich. 1988. Negative life stress, social problem-solving self-appraisal, and hopelessness: Implications for suicide research. Cognitive Therapy and Research 12, 6 (1988), 549--556.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Pete Burnap, Walter Colombo, and Jonathan Scourfield. 2015. Machine classification and analysis of suicide-related communication on twitter. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media. ACM, 75--84. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Marco Caliendo and Sabine Kopeinig. 2008. Some practical guidance for the implementation of propensity score matching. Journal of economic surveys 22, 1 (2008), 31--72.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jonathan TO Cavanagh, Alan J Carson, Michael Sharpe, and Stephen M Lawrie. 2003. Psychological autopsy studies of suicide: a systematic review. Psychological medicine 33, 03 (2003), 395--405.Google Scholar
- David B Centerbar, Simone Schnall, Gerald L Clore, and Erika D Garvin. 2008. Affective incoherence: when affective concepts and embodied reactions clash. Journal of personality and social psychology 94, 4 (2008), 560.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Cindy Chung and James W Pennebaker. 2007. The psychological functions of function words. Social communication (2007), 343--359.Google Scholar
- John F Clarkin, RC Friedman, SW Hurt, R Corn, and M Aronoff. 1984. Affective and character pathology of suicidal adolescent and young adult inpatients. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (1984).Google Scholar
- Gualtiero B Colombo, Pete Burnap, Andrei Hodorog, and Jonathan Scourfield. 2015. Analysing the connectivity and communication of suicidal users on twitter. Computer Communications (2015). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Glen Coppersmith, Mark Dredze, and Craig Harman. 2014. Quantifying mental health signals in twitter. In ACL Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Glen Coppersmith, Mark Dredze, Craig Harman, and Kristy Hollingshead. 2015. From ADHD to SAD: Analyzing the Language of Mental Health on Twitter through Self-Reported Diagnoses. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality. North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Denver, CO, USA.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Glen Coppersmith, Craig Harman, and Mark Dredze. 2014. Measuring post traumatic stress disorder in Twitter. In International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM).Google Scholar
- Aron Culotta. 2014. Estimating county health statistics with Twitter. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 1335--1344. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Michael Gamon, and Susan Dumais. 2011. Mark my words!: linguistic style accommodation in social media. In Proceedings of the 20th international conference on World wide web. ACM, 745--754. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Munmun De Choudhury, Scott Counts, and Eric Horvitz. 2013. Predicting postpartum changes in emotion and behavior via social media. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM annual conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 3267--3276. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Munmun De Choudhury, Scott Counts, Eric Horvitz, and Aaron Hoff. 2014. Characterizing and Predicting Postpartum Depression from Facebook Data. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Munmun De Choudhury and Sushovan De. 2014. Mental Health Discourse on reddit: Self-disclosure, Social Support, and Anonymity. In Proc. ICWSM. AAAI.Google Scholar
- Munmun De Choudhury, Michael Gamon, Scott Counts, and Eric Horvitz. 2013. Predicting depression via social media. In AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.Google Scholar
- Gudrun Dieserud, Espen Røysamb, Øivind Ekeberg, and Pl Kraft. 2001. Toward an integrative model of suicide attempt: A cognitive psychological approach. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 31, 2 (2001), 153--168.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Thomas E Ellis and Katharine G Ratliff. 1986. Cognitive characteristics of suicidal and nonsuicidal psychiatric inpatients. Cognitive therapy and research 10, 6 (1986), 625--634.Google Scholar
- Yoav Freund and Robert E Schapire. 1999. Large margin classification using the perceptron algorithm. Machine learning 37, 3 (1999), 277--296. Google ScholarDigital Library
- King-wa Fu, Qijin Cheng, Paul WC Wong, and Paul SF Yip. 2015. Responses to a self-presented suicide attempt in social media. Crisis (2015).Google Scholar
- Lawrence M Glanz, Gretchen L Haas, and John A Sweeney. 1995. Assessment of hopelessness in suicidal patients. Clinical Psychology Review 15, 1 (1995), 49--64.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jeffrey T Hancock, Christopher Landrigan, and Courtney Silver. 2007. Expressing emotion in text-based communication. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 929--932. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Amanda Hass. "Please Do Not Downvote Anyone Whos Asked for Help". http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/users/2015 /03/reddit and suicide intervention how social media is changing the cry for.single.html. (????). Accessed: 2015-09-10.Google Scholar
- Christopher M Homan, Naiji Lu, Xin Tu, Megan C Lytle, and Vincent Silenzio. 2014. Social structure and depression in TrevorSpace. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing. ACM, 615--625. Google ScholarDigital Library
- David J Houghton and Adam N Joinson. 2012. Linguistic markers of secrets and sensitive self-disclosure in Twitter. In System Science (HICSS), 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on. IEEE, 3480--3489. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Guido W Imbens and Donald B Rubin. 2015. Causal Inference in Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences. Cambridge University Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sue Jamison-Powell, Conor Linehan, Laura Daley, Andrew Garbett, and Shaun Lawson. 2012. I can't get no sleep: discussing# insomnia on twitter. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 1501--1510. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jared Jashinsky, Scott H Burton, Carl L Hanson, Josh West, Christophe Giraud-Carrier, Michael D Barnes, and Trenton Argyle. 2015. Tracking suicide risk factors through Twitter in the US. Crisis (2015).Google Scholar
- Jody Kashden, William J Fremouw, Ty S Callahan, and Michael D Franzen. 1993. Impulsivity in suicidal and nonsuicidal adolescents. Journal of abnormal child psychology 21, 3 (1993), 339--353.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh, Paul N. Bennett, and Ryen W. White. 2015. Building Effective Query Classifiers: A Case Study in Self-harm Intent Detection. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mrinal Kumar, Mark Dredze, Glen Coppersmith, and Munmun De Choudhury. 2015. Detecting Changes in Suicide Content Manifested in Social Media Following Celebrity Suicides. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media. ACM, 85--94. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Alex Leavitt. 2015. This is a Throwaway Account: Temporary Technical Identities and Perceptions of Anonymity in a Massive Online Community. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. ACM, 317--327. Google ScholarDigital Library
- David Lester. 1974. Demographic versus clinical prediction of suicidal behaviors: A look at some issues. (1974).Google Scholar
- Peter M Lewinsohn, Ian H Gotlib, and John R Seeley. 1995. Adolescent psychopathology: IV. Specificity of psychosocial risk factors for depression and substance abuse in older adolescents. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 34, 9 (1995), 1221--1229.Google ScholarCross Ref
- David D Luxton, Jennifer D June, and Jonathan M Fairall. 2012. Social media and suicide: A public health perspective. American Journal of Public Health 102, S2 (2012), S195--S200.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Diana MacLean, Sonal Gupta, Anna Lembke, Christopher Manning, and Jeffrey Heer. 2015. Forum77: An Analysis of an Online Health Forum Dedicated to Addiction Recovery. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. ACM, 1511--1526. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Daniel McDuff, Amy Karlson, Ashish Kapoor, Asta Roseway, and Mary Czerwinski. 2012. AffectAura: an intelligent system for emotional memory. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 849--858. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Margaret Mitchell, Kristy Hollingshead, and Glen Coppersmith. 2015. Quantifying the Language of Schizophrenia in Social Media. In Proceedings of the NAACL Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Elizabeth L Murnane and Scott Counts. 2014. Unraveling abstinence and relapse: smoking cessation reflected in social media. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 1345--1354. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Matthew K Nock and Alan E Kazdin. 2002. Examination of affective, cognitive, and behavioral factors and suicide-related outcomes in children and young adolescents. Journal of clinical child and adolescent psychology 31, 1 (2002), 48--58.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Minsu Park, David W McDonald, and Meeyoung Cha. 2013. Perception Differences between the Depressed and Non-depressed Users in Twitter. In Proceedings of ICWSM.Google Scholar
- Michael J Paul and Mark Dredze. 2011. You Are What You Tweet: Analyzing Twitter for Public Health.. In ICWSM.Google Scholar
- Umashanthi Pavalanathan and Munmun De Choudhury. 2015. Identity Management and Mental Health Discourse in Social Media. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, 315--321. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C Pawlak, T Pascual-Sanchez, P Rae, W Fischer, and F Ladame. 1999. Anxiety disorders, comorbidity, and suicide attempts in adolescence: A preliminary investigation. European Psychiatry 14, 3 (1999), 132--136.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Keith Petrie and Richard Brook. 1992. Sense of coherence, self-esteem, depression and hopelessness as correlates of reattempting suicide. British Journal of Clinical Psychology 31, 3 (1992), 293--300.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Daniel W Prezant and Robert A Neimeyer. 1988. Cognitive predictors of depression and suicide ideation. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 18, 3 (1988), 259--264.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Michael J Priester and George A Clum. 1993. Perceived problem-solving ability as a predictor of depression, hopelessness, and suicide ideation in a college population. Journal of Counseling Psychology 40, 1 (1993), 79.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Paul R Rosenbaum and Donald B Rubin. 1983. The central role of the propensity score in observational studies for causal effects. Biometrika 70, 1 (1983), 41--55.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Donald B Rubin. 2011. Causal inference using potential outcomes. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. (2011).Google Scholar
- Thomas D Ruder, Gary M Hatch, Garyfalia Ampanozi, Michael J Thali, and Nadja Fischer. 2011. Suicide announcement on Facebook. Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention 32, 5 (2011), 280--282.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Anita Saltz and Stanley Marsh. 1990. Relationship between hopelessness and ultimate suicide: a replication with psychiatric outpatients. American Journal of Psychiatry 147 (1990), 190--195.Google ScholarCross Ref
- H Andrew Schwartz, Johannes Eichstaedt, Margaret L Kern, Gregory Park, Maarten Sap, David Stillwell, Michal Kosinski, and Lyle Ungar. 2014. Towards assessing changes in degree of depression through facebook. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality. 118--125.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ralf Schwarzer and Reinhard Fuchs. 1995. Changing risk behaviors and adopting health behaviors: The role of self-efficacy beliefs. Self-efficacy in changing societies (1995), 259--288.Google Scholar
- RJ Senter and EA Smith. 1967. Automated readability index. Technical Report. DTIC Document.Google Scholar
- David Shaffer. 1988. The epidemiology of teen suicide: an examination of risk factors. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (1988).Google Scholar
- Jianbo Shi and Jitendra Malik. 2000. Normalized cuts and image segmentation. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on 22, 8 (2000), 888--905. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Edwin S Shneidman. 1993. Commentary: Suicide as psychache. The Journal of nervous and mental disease 181, 3 (1993), 145--147.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Morton M Silverman and Ronald W Maris. 1995. The prevention of suicidal behaviors: An overview. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 25, 1 (1995), 10--21.Google Scholar
- Steven John Stack. 2014. Mental Illness and Suicide.Google Scholar
- The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Health, Illness, Behavior, and Society (2014).Google Scholar
- Hajime Sueki. 2015. The association of suicide-related Twitter use with suicidal behaviour: A cross-sectional study of young internet users in Japan. Journal of affective disorders 170 (2015), 155--160.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Katherine M Thomas and Marshall Duke. 2007. Depressed writing: Cognitive distortions in the works of depressed and nondepressed poets and writers. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 1, 4 (2007), 204.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sho Tsugawa, Yusuke Kikuchi, Fumio Kishino, Kosuke Nakajima, Yuichi Itoh, and Hiroyuki Ohsaki. 2015. Recognizing Depression from Twitter Activity. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 3187--3196. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hong-Hee Won, Woojae Myung, Gil-Young Song, Won-Hee Lee, Jong-Won Kim, Bernard J Carroll, and Doh Kwan Kim. 2013. Predicting national suicide numbers with social media data. PloS one 8, 4 (2013), e61809.Google ScholarCross Ref
- G Udny Yule. 1897. On the theory of correlation. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 60, 4 (1897), 812--854.Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- Discovering Shifts to Suicidal Ideation from Mental Health Content in Social Media
Recommendations
Detecting Changes in Suicide Content Manifested in Social Media Following Celebrity Suicides
HT '15: Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social MediaThe Werther effect describes the increased rate of completed or attempted suicides following the depiction of an individual's suicide in the media, typically a celebrity. We present findings on the prevalence of this effect in an online platform: r/...
A Taxonomy of Ethical Tensions in Inferring Mental Health States from Social Media
FAT* '19: Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and TransparencyPowered by machine learning techniques, social media provides an unobtrusive lens into individual behaviors, emotions, and psychological states. Recent research has successfully employed social media data to predict mental health states of individuals, ...
Methodological Gaps in Predicting Mental Health States from Social Media: Triangulating Diagnostic Signals
CHI '19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsA growing body of research is combining social media data with machine learning to predict mental health states of individuals. An implication of this research lies in informing evidence-based diagnosis and treatment. However, obtaining clinically valid ...
Comments